“Understood,” she says. Her voice is level. Her eyes are clear. Good.
“Follow me.” We leave the bungalow for options.
Best exit is water. It’s harder to track than footprints or tire tracks in the sand. No planes on the island—no place for a runway. No helicopters either. I looked when we arrived. There’s a service skiff, the dive tender, or a bright orange lifeboat. The skiff is fast and simple. The tender is loud and draws eyes. The lifeboat is obvious and locked.
The skiff it is.
We leave through the maintenance building. A housekeeper glances up and sees robes and then looks down. Robes at a resort are the best disguise—staff assume that either you knowwhere you’re going or you’re lost, and either way, they’d rather be too busy to deal with you. At the back door I push the latch, let it creak, and hold it. We move through bleach and steam to daylight.
The skiff sits with the battery switch off and the kill cord wound tight. I pull the cowling and run eyes and fingers once. Fuel line. Primer bulb. Coil. Throttle head. No extra tape. No fresh bolts with wrong heads. No wire that runs where wire should not run.
No bombs on board.
“Step in and sit low.”
She does so without hesitation. “Can I help?”
“Just stay low.” The outboard coughs and catches when I tell it to. I coil the stern line and drop it clean. I shake the bow line loose and we slide free.
No kayaks in our lane, no paddleboards. They prefer the smoother water of the other side of the island. I stay inside the lee of the reef until we clear the ring and the white anchored boat.
That boat had my men on it. There should be two standing there.
No one stands there now. Only a red smear against the white edge, as if someone’s bloody hand grabbed it and failed.
I do not stop to count ghosts.
Mina keeps one hand flat on the gunwale and her eyes on the horizon. She’s low in the boat, just like I told her. He’d never get a shot off at her like this. Only me, standing at the helm. But there’s no one out around this side of the island, and the main island is ahead.
It looks like a clear shot to our destination, and that makes me wary.
“Why can’t he leave us alone?” she shouts to be heard over the wind.
“Pride.”
I watch her shoulders lift and drop, like she’s sighing. She knows why he’ll never leave us alone. She’s frustrated, so she’s asking questions she knows the answers to. I understand the feeling all too well.
Shockingly, we reach the main island marina without incident. This means he truly is doing this alone. I’m insulted that he thinks he can kill me on his own, but considering the havoc he has wreaked so far, he’s not wrong.
I slide past the big boats and into the staff channel, where it’s easier to maneuver. Diesel drums sit on the dock. A barge needs paint. Two men in vests look at us, then at the water, then at a clipboard. We climb onto the dock and run to where I told the driver to be.
He’s there, leaning on the hood like he has been checking the time. He throws me a towel. I wipe once and drop it on the engine cover. “Tail.”
He nods once and opens the rear door. Mina gets in and slides across. I sit behind the driver. We peel out.
I call the plane at the last bend around the south end of the main island. “Bomb sweep in progress,” the captain says. He knows I will do my own sweep.
I pay my people well to keep them honest, but that doesn’t mean someone can’t pay them off. It was the captain’s job to stay withthe plane the whole time we were away. If he stepped away for so much as taking a piss, something could have happened.
I send Mina up first with the captain. I watch how the floor flexes under her feet. A device on a rail sings wrong. Nothing to worry about here. I check and recheck anything that seems too good to be true. I find nothing.
There comes a moment in every escape where you have to trust that things will go right. It comes after you’ve done everything you reasonably can to ensure that fact. I could spend an hour checking out the plane, but instead, I check the easiest spots to sabotage. We don’t have the time for a thorough check, which means I have to trust that my check is enough.
When it comes to protecting Mina, nothing feels like enough.
If there is a bomb on this plane, I did not earn survival today. I climb the stairs and nod. The captain hits the switch. The door thumps. The seal sets. The cabin goes quiet.
Mina buckles in across from me. She watches my face and not the runway. She looks for tremors. I give her none. She gives me none back. I know my calmness helps her stay that way. “Everything looked okay?”
